Automating a web application optimizes work flow, helps minimize errors, and makes the product robust. An automated suite will be successful when a system's behavior is predictable. If a system is not predictable, there will be many automation hurdles that need to be handled carefully. Sometimes while automating a web application, we may face an exception, NoSuchElementException, which is thrown when the element that is being interacted with is not found. This may look weird when you can actually see the element on the webpage, but it has vanished during Selenium test automation.
The principal cause of this exception is that the element we're trying to interact with actually exists on the page but takes time to load and display itself to the user. As you can imagine, this can turn out to be a major issue during automation and can lead our scripts astray. This is where Thread.sleep() in Selenium Java comes into play. Before we look into the effective use of the Thread.sleep() Java function, let's take a look at the basics about Thread.sleep() in Selenium.